On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Brian LeRoux <[email protected]> wrote: > So, interestingly the Node dudes have expressed they are ok w/ us > experimenting w/ the npm registry for our plugin-discovery mechanism. > This is really great news ... >
I love being able to reuse the npm commands/structure for our plugins - one less thing for us to invent. But I don't think using a registry will work in practice for our "built in" plugins. The way I've pictured this is that when you d/l a Cordova build, you get all our existing "built in" plugins with the download. And then you can add/remove from that set. You should also be able to add/remove from other places, and npmjs.org would be a great place to move existing content to, that currently exists in github/phonegap-plugins. But maintaining the built-in plugins in npmjs.org seems like it's going to be a bit of a pain to me. > It is not without some irony that this also means our plugin packaging > format will be package.json ---which really has bad symmetry with our > current config/manifest file being config.xml. (I think its fine, for > now, but something we should discuss.) > So, it's weird, having JSON and XML as "config files". But frankly, having XML files as "config files" just seems weirder every day to me. :-) As a final note, using "node package standards" means we can likely make use of Browserify, for folks that want to optimize their JS, or otherwise are happy with a "build" (like me). Doing a build means I can put a single script/src in my html, and then just do a build to concat all the modules together. And if you care, Browserify also includes some node-compatible packages like events. The one thing about using Browserify is that we'll need to allow for our require() to be swapped out with Browserify's, as theirs is more complete than ours. -- Patrick Mueller http://muellerware.org
